The area under a fireworks show already gets peppered with the remains of all the exploded shells. A little added debris from a drone struck by part of the fireworks would make no difference. They always make sure that the fallout zone is in a safe area.

Add to that that the shells are mortar-fired, not rockets, and the risk of this is practically nil. Way less than the risks of just using and handling all that explosive.

Every professional fireworks show - at least, all those that are televised - should include shots from a drone up there amongst it all. The spectacular pictures are well worth the tiny risk.

They are unpowered shells shot from a mortar, not rockets. If they hit the copter (unlikely), they will explode lower than planned, but still well up there and over the water. Considering that the copter was flying around their planned burst altitude anyway, it is likely that only the pilot would notice the collision.

Sometimes fireworks go off early. Sometimes they go off in the launcher. Shit happens, which is why professional fireworks shows aren't cheap: they take mishaps into account when planning safety. The mortar shells won't go farther after slamming into an obstruction.

Sorry, but nope. Even that had to be taken into account when accounting for the safety zone.

These fireworks are shot up from mortars. Essentially a tube with a ball (the "payload") and a propelling charge underneath. The safety zone must account for misfires of all kinds, including propelling charges that are too weak to hurl the payload far enough. Which is, essentially, what would happen when it hits something on its way.

If that now happened, i.e. if the "ball" hit the quad, what would have happened is th

I agree as I actually seen an almost pretty bad accident this 4th with amateur fireworks. Since it's legal to shoot off amateur mortars in this state, at least half the households here were shooting them off this year. The neighbor behind us had something go wrong and the mortar went a partially curved trajectory and ended up hitting a power line which caused it to redirect straight for where my other neighbor was shooting his fireworks off. Of course it exploded when it hit the ground and if he was ther

Since this was a professional fireworks display, it is safe to assume that the person or organization orchestrating it had to take into consideration that what goes up must come down, i.e. the area where the stuff that goes boom up there lands eventually is "safe". Also because the odd black shell may come down, and the quad isn't that much heavier. Essentially, if it goes down it's basically a black shell without the possibility to detonate.

my father shoots off professional shows and I asked him about this. he said the worst case scenario he can think of would be if the drone was low, like within 20 feet of the launch and it blasted it with a direct hit. he said the crowds generally would be safe as they do take mishaps like a rogue firework into consideration when planning the location and the distance of the viewers. on the other hand that could potentially cause issues with the people setting them off. he says where the thing was in relati

Read about the new ridiculous rules [slashdot.org] the FAA imposed about drones.. Then you will understand. Don't you know we are living in a time when someone does something cool, it is automatically illegal?

Read about the new ridiculous rules [slashdot.org] the FAA imposed about drones.. Then you will understand. Don't you know we are living in a time when someone does something cool, it is automatically illegal?

What rules? I see nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters. A Federal Court has already ruled that all these FAA press releases have no binding power over anybody, dismissing the only case the FAA has brought which has gone to judgement so far.

Federal agencies can't just issue press releases and demand that people follow them. The US is a nation governed by laws, which means the government needs a law or regulation to cite when taking action against somebody.

"Federal agencies can't just issue press releases and demand that people follow them." Well, that ship sailed a while back, unfortunately, as far too many people believe that is how it works and our current "beloved leader" seems to spend the majority of his time furthering this notion.

The 400 (not 500) foot figure comes from FAA advisory circular 91-57 [faa.gov] made back in 1981, and the key thing about this is that it's *advisory*, not mandatory.

The AMA safety code [modelaircraft.org] says "Not fly higher than approximately 400 feet above ground level within three (3) miles of an airport without notifying the airport operator." -- but those are just safety rules for AMA members (and a good idea for everybody) -- but they do not have the force of law behind them.

Now, the FAA may change the laws in the future, but so far... this 400 foot ceiling people talk about does not exist. (Some places have restricted airspace... that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this blanket 400 foot height limit people keep bringing up that doesn't exist.

As others have pointed out, the FAA has not issued any rules for model aircraft, either. They've only issued advisory circulars.

Hence my point about "nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters." If you feel differently, cite the appropriate regulation. For example, 14 CFR 121.317(h) says that you're not allowed to smoke in a commercial airliner bathroom. That is a federal regulation and enforceable in court.

What rules? I see nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations or US Code covering these matters. A Federal Court has already ruled that all these FAA press releases have no binding power over anybody, dismissing the only case the FAA has brought which has gone to judgement so far.

Apples and oranges.

That court ruling is in regard to the process of issuing fines for the use of a UAV for commercial purposes. Most articles I've read about this ruling have take an academic legal argument being made to avoid paying a fine, and have extrapolated it into some huge governmental over reach. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Congress has given the FAA this power to regulate (set rules, levy fine) anything that flies for commercial purpose. This power seems rather clear cut and the court agrees. The court's only issue is that the FAA was ambiguous in defining a UAV for the purpose of issuing fines - that the FAA rules could essentially fine a commercial operator for a paper airplane, which even the FAA agrees would be ridiculous.

The court's issue was that the FAA had not "issued an enforceable FAR regulatory rule governing model aircraft" and that subsequent attempts to create policy were "not issued as a notice of proposed rulemaking" and "did not satisfy the requirements of 5 USC 533(d)."

As I stated above, "I don't deny that the FAA has the legal authority to create regulations governing UAVs. They just haven't done it yet."

Until some moron flys one into the path of a commercial airliner, small plane, or helicopter, and people die - than it's "why isn't the FAA doing something about this?"

Rules won't stop someone from doing that because it's obviously intended to try to hurt someone. I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again. Anything with more planning than that is an attack.

Most of the people who have been here for a while know how to do these things but choose not to because they don't want to fuck it up for people who want to do something cool. Assholes do these things because they don't have enough imagination to do something cool.

In reality this is the argument, the cool people who want to do something cool with technology VS the assholes who want to do something assholic with technology and fucking things up for the cool people. They're the people that do something assholic and force authorities to kneejerk into making anti asshole regulations, which also prevents people from doing something cool.

Until some moron flys one into the path of a commercial airliner, small plane, or helicopter, and people die - than it's "why isn't the FAA doing something about this?"

Rules won't stop someone from doing that because it's obviously intended to try to hurt someone. I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.

Wait; there were jet aircraft flying through the fireworks display's volume? How did the drone miss getting a picture of that? That'd have been really fun to watch, especially when the fireworks started hitting the airplane.

(Given that there was a fireworks display going on in that airspace at the time, I'm kinda doubtful that there were any pilots in the area who weren't well aware of them. And I also sorta doubt that there were any children running around under the fireworks. That's usually strong

I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.

You would lose that bet. Turbine aircraft can be disabled by stray metal bits as small as a single bolt. An entire drone, with many metal components, would undoubtedly render a turbine engine inoperable. For this reason, airport operators routinely inspect and pick up all debris on runways and taxiways. It's called FOD (foreign object damage), and is an ever-present risk to aircraft.

No, he'd win it. Even if the engine immediately went to zero thrust, the other engine would still be sufficient to find a suitable landing field. In fact, such things are practiced regularly, both simulated (for large jets) and in real life (smaller aircraft). It'd be expensive to fix, but entirely survivable, given a suitably-competent pilot.

Not all jet aircraft have multiple engines. And, with single engine aircraft, the odds of having a suitably-competent pilot at the controls is somewhat lower than with huge passenger or cargo carriers.

Let's just say that when the shit hits the fan (literally, in this case) bad things can happen. I'd rather not be aboard any aircraft in flight when something is sucked through the turbine(s). The ultimate catastrophic

I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.

You might want to rethink that after being reminded of jet airliners being brought down by birds - not an ounce of metallic content, just a few pounds of meat and soft lightweight bones - or the 747 which almost crashed after all four engines failed from ingesting some ash. (Fortunately, they

Illegal, because to film this, he probably flew above the 500 foot RC ceiling, as well as flying at night in a cloud of firework smoke makes following the "maintain visual contact with the aircraft" rule virtually impossible. Dangerous, because if the craft where to be hit, and not entirely disabled, it could easily veer into a vector that took it well out of pilot control, and end up crashing into the general public at large, all of which makes the FAA pretty unhappy.

Maybe and maybe not. There is always the chance that the firework could malfunction on it's own. Possible malfunction is one of they many reasons that in professional shows, no one gets to sit under where the fireworks are intended to go or anywhere a wind shift or malfunction may take them. I suppose if a drone collided with a mortar very close to the ground as the mortar was being launched it might alter the trajectory, but at the altitude from where the pictures were being taken, the firework has gone wh

Yes, this copter was flying high. Would take a split second for it to dive down. Or be trivial for anybody else to purposefully fly a drone at 50 feet above the ground... in the dark right up to the launch site.

Split second? No. Falling from a height of 500 feet would take approximately 5.5 seconds, discounting air resistance. There is no way this drone could drop that far "in a split second."

If they were "right up to the launch site", there would be too many lift charges going off and too much smoke for them to see where the craft was, so that's not possible either. Even IF one of the shells were to hit the copter, they weigh MUCH MORE than this thing does, so physics dictates their path would barely be affect

Even granting the unlikely event of a collision, The shell weighs more than the copter, it isn't going to stop dead and it's not going to go near people. This is especially true since you might have noticed that the higher flying shells were bursting at the copter's height.

Since you believe the people not worried by this are fucking, I guess that means you're not fucking? Perhaps that's why you're so uptight?:-)

Professional fireworks are mortar-fired shells, not rockets that can go off-course if nudged. So if a shell hit the drone on the way up, it would smash straight through it and keep on going. There is not enough mass in a drone, and a drone is not solid enough, to deflect the solid mass of a firework shell travelling at speed. It might not quite reach the same height by a few meters, or might end up a couple of feet off target, but neither of these things would matter.

And if the drone is up at altitude where the shells explode, then there is even less speed involved. The shell has reached it's height - so what if it taps a drone before detonating.

There is also whole lot of sky, and both shells and drones are small. The chance of the two coming together is practically nil.

Amazing pictures captured with zero risk. Images from a drone up there amongst it all should be a permanent feature of firework presentations.

More than that: fireworks go off early sometimes. I've seen them go off in the launcher, and go off at low elevation above the launcher. It's not a safety risk at all: it's planned for. (Also, these mortal shells aren't all that accurate to begin with, so hitting a drone on the way is probably noise in the safety margins anyhow.)

Very cool video. I actually saw a fireworks display once from the height at which the shells were bursting - coolest thing I've ever seen. Glad more people can see this!

The shell smashes the drone into tiny bits of confetti, and continues on it's merry way. Or, more likely the shell snaps off a rotor arm without noticing.

They will not bounce off each other like billiard balls. That's what happens when you have a collision between equal mass objects in which kinetic energy is conserved. This would be a collision between different mass objects where energy is lost to work - destroying the drone. The one with the most momentum wins.

I don't get why American fireworks displays are so small. I'd love to see this copter fly through fireworks in Reykjavík on New Years Eve. The Macy's 4th of july fireworks display in New York shoots off about 10 tons of fireworks. Iceland (most of the population being in Reykjavík and its adjacent municipalities, about 250k people) shoots off about 600 tons of fireworks on New Years, the weight of about 5 adult blue whales. The whole city looks like this [google.is] for literally about an hour. It's not organized, it's just everyone shooting off an average of about 9 kilograms / 20 pounds per family - some more, some less. You see fireworks like the stuff that copter flew through in little towns of 1-2 thousand people. Even if you only count organized displays, it just seems to be so disproportionately little in the US. Pretty much every festival that does fireworks here shoots off several tons. Or otherwise just burns pretty much everything [google.is] that's not nailed down [google.is]. Or as more often is the case, both at the same time.

??? I don't see that all. The links are just google image searches on "reykjavík fireworks", "brenna gamlárskvöldið", and "jóðhátíð í eyjum". Oh, hmm.... I'm betting that because I'm searching from Iceland I get differently biased results. I know that my regular google searches at least bias towards Icelandic sites. Okay, well, basically picture this [icelandtravel.is] for an hour while several dozen of these [newsoficeland.com] are ongoing, or summer festivals like this [staticflickr.com].

The main reason why many governments have regulations for how much fireworks you can fire off in one night is that fireworks produce toxic smoke. Reykjavik is a relatively small city situated in what I believe is a windy area far away from any other major urban centers, so I would think that the potential for humans to be exposed being exposed to smoke from fireworks is unusually low there.

Yes, your description of size, wind, etc are accurate. Also it's a rather moist climate, not much fire risk. And most buildings are concrete. And the city is half surrounded by ocean. And since the money goes to support the rescue services, the incentive is to encourage people to shoot off as many as possible, rather than the other way around.

The poppers which aren't regulated as regular firework, go for about 50 cents to $1 per box. I don't recall how many are in a box, maybe 25.

The better consumer fireworks are 2" shells and sell for about $18 for a box of six. 500 gram cakes are about $60. These are all Texas prices, near the import port at Houston. Hazmat shipping to other parts of the country may increase retail prices elsewhere.

Enthusiasts who spend $300 or more can pay 60% less by joining a group to buy at wholesale prices.

It's not like it's an easy place to put an expensive camera into. Anything bigger than a small R/C plane and they'd have stopped the fireworks entirely -- and personally, I'm sort of surprised that they didn't when they saw this craft up there. The odds of having the craft hit by a shell and crashing into the water were significant as well.

I love it too, but just because I love it, doesn't mean that I don't also think it's something that could have turned out really badly. The video clearly shows a number of near misses, and the last thing I want landing on a fireworks barge is a flaming, sparking machine that fell from the sky. Considering these fireworks were all directly over the barges, any near misses he had were also over them.

Even so, that doesn't temper the fact that the video is absolutely outstanding. I'm just glad it turned out oka

..as a pyrotechnician, honestly, the biggest risk here is the guy's equipment.As a general rule of thumb, the minimum safety distance for fireworks is 120% of their maximum range - so even if a rack of mortar tubes falls over towards the public, noone is going to get hit.

There's a huge amount of inertia behind the bombs: it's not hard to imagine (or do the sums) to work out the energy required to hurl a 1KG 150m into the air. In a head on collision between a drone and a decent calibre firework, the firewor

I do. It's the I don't fly planes because they may crash, and there are possibly terrorists in my basement right now crowd are afraid they may end up on a TV show called "Truly bizarre ways unlucky people die".

They are probably posting the negative comments from their phones while driving down the highway, speeding of course because the government sets those speed limits to collect fines and safety has nothing to do with it.

It's that thing that is dangerous, not the drones. Drones are never going to get any more expensive than they are now. They're only going to get cheaper, more disposable, and harder to trace back to their pilot.

People are going to do whatever they please with them. If some other activity isn't compatible, then it's that activity we'll have to restrict.

While it was cool, I can see how this could be considered dangerous. I don't know much about fireworks, but I can imagine that a collision between a UAV and the firework itself could potentially alter the trajectory of the firework leading it to go somewhere it shouldn't. You get enough senseless idiots flying these things around pyrotechnics, something bad will eventually happen.

I'd say there is a far greater risk of the firework itself having a failure that sends it somewhere unintended, though even that wasn't much of a risk here.

This is a fireworks display over water. The firework round has a certain total amount of energy available to it determined by the amount of propellant inside. The launchers were probably located far enough from crowds that even under the most unfavorable conditions a round could not have hit anybody - that is if the firework were directly aimed at the

The biggest point is that the sky is big and both the shells and the drone are small. The chance of the two coming into contact is negligible. The risk of anything bad happening if that happens is also very small - the only thing I can see happening is if a rotor happens to cut the shell's fuse. The shell is too heavy for a fragile drone to have much effect on it.

The Fisheye distortion is insanely annoying. If you are going to use fisheye lens, don't pan the camera like crazy. Who the hell does several 360s in a row with a fisheye? Insanely annoying distortion...

Hey, I look on the bright side; even if it's illegal and dangerous at least the person responsible didn't use "Sail" by AWOLNation like every other GoPro video uses. So it appears they at least have some taste.

Lately the media have latched onto anything drone related and put it in a bad light - and while I think the video is awesome (I'd love to do one myself!) - the media is yet again putting this in a bad light - driving the FAA further to action. I suspect too that if the pyro-technicians/firefighters below knew he was up there they would have stopped the show.

And when these "media controversies" come out its its always the DJI Phantom. When I first got into making model aircraft - the DJI kits were top notch

I suggest that you visit Youtube, and do a search for Isle of Man TT. There are a lot of videos, and the very best are shot from helicopters. The second best are shot from beside the roadway, by professionals. Onboard video shot with GoPros are decidedly lesser quality in most cases, but the are still better quality than professional equipment was when I was a child. All that quality, packed into a unit easily mounted on a person's head, or on the forks of a motorcycle.

How is this idiotic? Unless you're talking about the potential idiocy of wasting all that money on a drone and a Gopro camera potentially blown up by fireworks. This was filmed over water. Nobody was in danger except the drone owner's bank account. (And maybe the one in a million chance of the drone falling on the odd boater...)

More likely than a direct hit on the drone by a shell (likely to make the drone drop straight out of the sky, probably in multiple pieces) is the prospect of some debris getting into one or more of the brushless motors. This could cause the motor to overheat, or cause the ESC talking to it to get things wrong. The flight controller can get confused by this, and you could end up with a high battery drain, and the machine doing a nice ti

Beyond all of that, this is about public perception. The complete tool who did this is practically begging to have members of the public pile onto the FAA's existing effort to, in practice, shut down this entire hobby and almost every attempt to put these tools to work in research and business. Gee, thanks.

More likely, members of the public will watch the video and think it's great and isn't it great that someone is able to do that. Relax.

More importantly we could all get killed by terrorists! Won't someone think of the children!!!!!

You have one of the most extreme cases of alarmism I've seen. I think we need to address your points individually in turn:

1. Flight controller may get confused and attempt to fly the thing. Or more realistically what happens when you lose a prop is the thing flips and splats straight down. Try it one day, or just jump on youtube and watch what happens when a quad suffers complete motor failure. They definitely do

The flight controller is ALWAYS flying the thing. And if you were paying attention (which you weren't), you'd note that I was talking about how the flight controller might handle the presence of debris gumming up a motor and overheating an ESC. It happens all the time - insects, dust, leaves, etc. As I also pointed out, this stuff will seem mysterious to smug people who obviously have no experience with this stuff in the real world.

The Phantom 2 is 1kg

About half again that much by the time you install gimbal, camera, and VTX

I can see the drone somehow being hit by a fireworks missile, deflecting that missile, and the missile going who knows where? Back down into the crowd (or worse, the launch site)? If it stayed above the explosions, fine; within them, maybe. But fireworks on that scale are risky at best. Throwing a solid object like some of the larger drones into the middle of them just adds to the danger.

But I must say, even if never done again, that's a wonderful video, perhaps the first ever?

Not really. I've been on a commercial crew, and this has effectively zero impact on the safety of the show. The only danger would be the kind discussed by lawyers and insurance companies, neither of which would impact the actual firing safety of a show like this. It was shot over water, and even if this was knocked out of commission and landed on a barge, the weight would be insufficient to damage or misalign any but the smallest (3" or 4" mortar - and those are racked for stability.

There is a nice video out there of a quadcopter that loses control and flips. But because it uses a stabilized camera mount the picture is still perfectly oriented with the horizon all the way to the ground, while the quadcopter is all over the place.
That you don't understand something doesn't make it a fake.
No reason to even get into the silliness of assuming that there is some massive shock wave that would have flipped the copter over.